ABSTRACT
Post-Cold War trends forecast an increasingly developed and capable People’s Republic of China continuing to rise while facing major encumbrances in an East Asian order led by the USA. The end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War destroyed the strategic framework for the Sino–US cooperation initiated by US President Richard Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong. Occasional dramatic crises since that time have seen policymakers, strategists and scholars in both the USA and China register concern and sometimes alarm over potential conflict. Major turning points include:
the multi-year virulent American opposition to Chinese leaders responsible for the crackdown against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989;
the face-off of US–Chinese forces as a result of the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995–96;
the crisis in 1999 prompted by the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and resulting mass demonstrations and destruction of US diplomatic properties in China;
the crash in 2001 of a Chinese fighter jet and a US reconnaissance plane over international waters near China and resulting crisis over responsibility for the incident and release of the American crew and damaged plane; and
the explicit and growing US–Chinese competition for influence in East Asia featuring Barack Obama’s government’s so-called pivot or rebalancing policy to the Asia-Pacific region coinciding with greater Chinese assertiveness in dealing with differences with the USA and its allies and associates over issues of sovereignty and security along China’s rim (Sutter 2013a; Shambaugh 2012).
